Latency measurements have become an important part of IT infrastructure and application monitoring. The latencies of a wide variety of events like requests, function calls, garbage collection, disk IO, system-call, CPU scheduling, etc. are of great interest to engineers operating and developing IT systems. But there are a number of technical challenges associated with managing and analyzing latency data.

StatsD is a key unifying protocol and set of tools for collecting application metrics and gaining visibility into the performance of applications. StatsD as a protocol was created by Etsy in 2011 for emitting application metrics. Soon after, the StatsD Server was developed as a tool for receiving StatsD line protocol metrics and subsequently aggregating them. While there are no official backends as part of the StatsD ecosystem, Graphite became the most commonly used.